I'm Helping to Kill the Sports Car

"The last time I owned a sports car, all my library books went overdue."

March 2015 By JOHN PHILLIPS Multiple Photographers

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From the April 2015 issue

In an interview with Bloomberg News, BMW’s head of sales, Ian Robertson, recently said: “The sports-car market is roughly half of what it used to be. Post-2008, it just collapsed. I’m not so sure it’ll ever fully recover.”

There then followed a rancid tsunami of “Is the Sports Car Dead?” conversations, including vicious slurs, dog bites, huffy indignation, leeches, a few stabbings, and a trampoline act. It was as if yet another news-cycle bogeyman had terrified us stiff over the threat of recalls, the polar vortex, and ebola in Quietus, Montana. Of course, Robertson didn’t say that sports cars were dead, merely that sales sucked. Newspapers cited the Audi TT, BMW Z4, and Mercedes-Benz SLK for ­having accounted for 114,000 sales in 2007 before dropping 45 percent by 2010. That’s what they said.

My colleague Keith Martin, publisher of Sports Car Market, immediately replied, “Ask yourself why Ian would say that.” Which is a good question, because maybe Robertson is a little thin-skinned these days, given the Ultimate Driving Machine’s collaboration with Toyota to build what is likely a replacement Z4 for 2018 or so. Funny that it was Toyota that asked Subaru to build the Scion FR-S for them, a lash-up that still has marketers suggesting that the volume for sports cars maybe no longer ­justifies the investment. Perhaps Chrysler nowadays agrees, what with Viper sales last year falling into the Valley of Fatigue and the Conner Avenue plant going as dark as an owl’s armpit.

2015 Alfa Romeo 4C coupe and Spyder

Robertson went on to suggest that SUVs have displaced sports cars as today’s testosteronated status symbols, a notion I find a little wobbly, unless he’s talking about Cayenne Turbos, Land Cruisers, and Range Rovers. We surely do, however, wallow in the piggy notion that every single mobile function must be packed into every single vehicle, like Grizzly Adams’s Swiss Army knife—usable on-road, off-road, as a sedan, a wagon, an errand-hopper, a minivan, and as a multi-ton pedigree of manliness. That’s anti­thetical to sports cars, of course, which began as single-purpose machines of fragile merriment whose only ancillary function was to leak battery acid and set fire to your garage. Thank God single-purpose sports cars yet exist, with the Alfa Romeo 4C shining brightly in my own woolly universe, its maw of a turbo inlet sounding like the men’s-room urinal at an Oakland Raiders game. It should come with a “Sunday Use Only” label, plus a pair of anti-blur Foster Grants.

I could go on. Actually, I will. If you’re worrying about the segment’s death, don’t. I’m right now holding a list of all the sports cars I drove in 1992. I don’t know why I still have it, but I do. There are 26 names on that list, if you’ll indulge the inclusion of the Honda CRX ($10,000 back then!) and the Cadillac Allanté (hey, a two-seater with a V-8; come on). Then I counted the sports cars that should be available this year. That list is just three names shorter, at 23. “Except what we call a sports car has changed,” says Corvette impresario Reeves Callaway. “Many everyday drivers fulfill some quotient of the sports-car experience. A big part of that experience can today be transmitted by flexing, say, a Volkswagen Golf GTI.”

Peter Brock, creator of the Shelby Daytona Cobra Coupe, agrees. “Today, it’s progressed into a more comfortable mode of sport,” he told me. “Now the real sports car is maybe the Subaru WRX.”

“A Mini as a sports car?” I hear you sputtering while anodizing your Strombergs. Well, if a CRX qualified 23 years ago, a Mini qualifies today. Which raises my relentlessly unscientific poll of sports cars to 33 in 2015. Take that, Robertson, you nattering nabob of negativism.

Corvette chief engineer Tadge Juechter told me, “Of course, in the U.S., CAFE laws based on vehicle size are particularly punitive to high power-to-weight vehicles,” then opined that a sports car’s primary role might now be as “a test bed for new technologies that make cars more efficient.” Ex-Esperante builder Don Panoz added that as long as a car “is built in the hundreds and not the thousands,” its exclusivity alone elevates it to sports-car status. I like that notion.

Last time I owned a sports car, all my library books went overdue. If I could take over the world with, oh, let’s say a very large magnet, I’d own a 4C. As it is, I am momentarily off to buy an army-green Toyota FJ Cruiser, which isn’t so much Grizzly’s Swiss Army knife as Bear Grylls’s. So, yeah, I’m helping to kill the sports car. It may kill me, too. Or at least make me very late for dinner.